How to Write Informational Content for Marketing Campaigns

Informational content is integral for marketing campaigns: It serves potential customers’ engagement at the first two stages of a sales funnel.

Indeed:

One can’t turn followers into customers if “feeding” them with promo content and direct ads from the very threshold. Awareness and interest in your brand come first, and informational content writing is your weapon to win here.

In this article, we reveal the difference between promotional and informational content, tell how the latter can help boost sales, and explain how to craft such content for your marketing campaigns to make your target audience care.

So, if you’re a copywriter, creative writer, or blogger willing to engage more followers — keep reading!

And if you’re a student, don’t hurry up to leave the page. Informative content for marketing takes many forms: blog posts, narratives, infographics, reviews, narratives, social media posts, and more. Given that students deal with tons of research and write various paper types in college, you deserve the name of a content creator, too.

So, let’s get this show on the road!

Informational vs. Promotional Content

When you’re a marketer or independent creator willing to earn extra bucks with your product, it’s tempting to promote it all the time. Why not if it’s so cool, right?

Not quite.

When you’re an online user looking for information to help you solve a problem, you know firsthand how annoying all those salesy texts can be. You want the answer to your question, not a purchase, c’mon!

For successful marketing campaigns, it’s critical to balance promotional and informative content, depending on the sales funnel stage. Both content types have a place to be in your content strategy, but you need to know when to share each with your audience.

What is informational content?

Informational content is the one educating your audience, helping answer their questions, and providing solutions to their problems. It’s the content showcasing your expertise with the goal of earning trust and making people see you as an authority in your field:

Once users start trusting you, they’ll be more willing to read your promotional content and, eventually, buy from you.

What is promotional content?

Promotional content is the one talking about your product or services directly. The goal is to influence your followers’ decision-making and convert them into customers.

The best writing practice for creating promo content is the “Show, not tell” technique: Help the audience understand the value of your offer. How will they benefit from choosing your product or service over others?

3 Features of Quality Content in Marketing

While types of marketing content are many, they all should meet the minimum criteria to earn the right to be called high-quality.

Quality content in digital marketing is informative, interesting, and relevant.

1. Informative. The content should share valuable and practical info with readers. It educates them or answers at least one of their questions on the topic. Informative content may come in different formats, — a blog article, a social media post, a graph, a step-by-step guide, etc. — so you need to structure it accordingly. This content can range from general information to strategic one you’ll later use for promos.
2. Interesting. The information itself is critical, but how you communicate it also matters. Your task is to engage readers, encourage them to keep investigating your content and make them remember your work. Everything matters here: conversational tone, surprising facts, statistics, power verbs, and proper formatting for better usability. Even the tiniest details matter.
3. Relevant. Your content should be relevant to your niche, business goals, and target audience’s needs. Every content piece you create and share online should serve a purpose: Don’t write it just because you “have to.”

Using Informational Content to Boost Sales

After reading all the above, you might conclude that informative content doesn’t serve any marketing purpose. It’s not so.

When crafted and used right, it’s a powerful tool for creating awareness around your brand and improving its revenue stream. All you need is a detailed content strategy — and informational content will start working on your sales boost:

1. Brand awareness. Good content, consistent and relevant, will make your resource top-notch and trustworthy. With a reputation of an authoritative website, you’ll earn traffic, backlinks, higher rankings in search engines, and more visitors (potential customers).
2. Credibility and trust. Once visitors see your informational content is high-quality, comprehensive, and up-to-date, they’ll return to your website, stepping to the next stages of a sales funnel: interest and evaluation.
3. Lead generation. Regular visitors and followers will know how your product or services work, so it will be easier for you to convince them to try it out. They already trust your brand, so they are more likely to choose you over others.

It’s all good and well, but how to do informational content writing to bring all the above benefits?

How to Write Informational Content to Make Readers Care

1. Find a problem to solve
2. Break the information into steps
3. Describe each step in detail
4. Add examples and illustrations
5. Read the article again

Find a Problem to Solve

First and foremost, it’s critical to choose a topic for your informational content. The main criterion here is this topic’s value for the target audience.

Content creation is a resource-consuming process: comprehensive articles, guides, how-to videos, and other types of marketing content take time to plan, prepare, and promote. That’s why it makes sense to invest in evergreen topics that will “pay for themselves.” 

How to find such promising topics?

• Examine search queries.
• Ask your customer support team about the clients’ most frequent questions.
• Analyze competitors’ content; find the most popular topics of their blogs.

After you decide on the topic, think of the best format for your content piece: Will it be a short blog post or a long read? Or maybe it’s worth making a checklist or an ebook? Video content calls the shots now, so it’s also worth trying if your resources allow it.

Break the Information into Steps

Informational content should be well-structured. Ensure to craft it logically, describing the details step by step. If you skip steps or mix them up, readers will find it difficult to put the instructions into practice. Also, the more logical the structure of the article, the easier it is to absorb the information.

For creating a logical text structure, it would help if you understood the topic yourself. Think of it from the user’s point of view and then write an outline.

If you write comprehensive how-to guides or step-by-step instructions, try crafting a two-column table: write down the steps in one column and briefly describe each in the second one. Like this:

It will help you see the content’s logic and notice the drawbacks and revise the outline accordingly.

Describe Each Step in Detail

Make each step a separate content block with a corresponding subhead.

As a rule, content creators build the blocks’ structure using the following scheme:

1. Beginning: Why the step is critical, when it comes in handy, and what is necessary for taking it.
2. Middle: The process itself, what one needs to do, and how to do that to achieve the goal set in the subhead.
3. End: What we’ve got in the result; and some clarifications if necessary.

For example, you write about customer segmentation. The process is complex and multi-step, so it’s essential to explain first: Why do you take each step? Or, you can start by explaining when and where to apply the step and then — tell how to take it to achieve the desired result.

Add Examples and Illustrations

After you’ve described each step, add illustrations, photos, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and other visual content to the blocks. Think of anything that can help the reader visualize the process and understand how to do it right.

Examples and case studies also help visualize content: It’s an element of storytelling, and we know that people perceive stories better.

If the article is difficult to illustrate and the text blocks describing the steps appear too long, use text boxes, add quotes, consider highlights — any formatting tricks and elements that will make it easier to read.

Read the Article Again

So, the draft of your informational content is ready. Now it’s time to re-read it and answer the following questions:

• Do all the steps come in order? Haven’t I missed anything?
• Are there any complex steps I could break into two separate ones?
• Have I considered all the possible details and pitfalls a user might face?
• Didn’t I forget to list things a user would need to check or take before using the advice from my content?
• Is it clear from the article when the tip is applicable and when it is not?
• Is the text clear? Will my audience be able to use the advice I give?

Informative Content Examples

And now, to practice:

Below are a few informational content examples from brands that nailed it. Please check for your inspiration and motivation to craft something like that. After all, our followers deserve the best, agree?

1) Chewy’s blog and YouTube channel:

What makes it good content:

Chewy sells pet products but they count on informative and valuable content, not promo ads or direct selling. Their YouTube channel is full of practical guides about pets, their health, and training: Educational videos help pet owners, thus building trust and making them choose Chewy’s products for their four-legged friends afterward.

Besides videos, they craft comprehensive text guides on the blog and share the links in video descriptions for users to find more information there. In blog posts, there are naturally built-in links to where pet owners can buy the corresponding products, thus encouraging viewers to visit the website and make purchases.

2) Moz’s topic clusters:

What makes it good content:

It’s comprehensive and organized as a cluster, which is effective for SEO and beneficial for users looking for all-in-one guides on the topic. A pillar page covers the steps one needs to take and links to related content, specific and covering each sub-topic in detail.

Such anchor-linked chapter lists, with comprehensive information about each step, provide value to readers and attract tons of traffic and backlinks to a website.

3) Townsend Security’s content offer

What makes it good content:

They’ve repurposed and repackaged all the content about their expertise into one actionable guide, offering it in exchange for users’ contact information. It allows users to take the content with them instead of looking for it on the website once they need it.

It’s a surefire way to convert visitors into leads: Offer them something valuable — guides, templates, workbooks, webinars — to build trust and get their contact info for further communication.

Six Don’ts of Informational Content Writing

1. Don’t write useless content
2. Don’t make it too general and vague
3. Don’t overcomplicate
4. Don’t make introductions too long
5. Don’t use passive voice
6. Don’t publish amateurish content

Don’t Write Useless Content

After reading your informational content, a user should get some practical knowledge. How-to texts are like guidelines for action: read and do; your audience needs the information that will help them solve a problem.

Remember your target and consider topics that will be relevant to their needs, worries, and pain points. It’s useless to write about cheap tickets to New Zealand for work-from-home moms living in the American countryside. You’ve got the point, haven’t you?

Don’t Make It Too General and Vague

The text should contain all the necessary information to help put your advice into practice. Nothing more.

Superfluous details will confuse the reader and overload the text. Try to make articles as concise as possible.

The common mistake is to answer a “what” question when writing about “how.” For example, a person writes about “How to fit a TV set” but adds a “What is a TV set” block to the article.

Sure, you need to explain specific terms to readers, but why consider them idiots?

If writing about how to plant roses, you don’t need to explain what roses are, right? No reason to write anything like, “Roses are among the most beautiful flowers, traditional and lush ones to plant in your garden.” When seeing such a sentence in your text, a person will likely leave the page: They’ll consider it irrelevant to their search intent.

Don’t Overcomplicate

If you explain how complex services work or give long instructions, there is a risk of crafting long and incomprehensible content assets few people will understand. It will turn out that you put a lot of effort into preparing the article, but no one will read it.

Try to write shorter. Avoid too complex sentences, long paragraphs, slang, abbreviations, and specific terms people might get wrong.

Don’t Make Introductions Too Long

Web writers know that online users don’t read but scan content first to decide if it’s worth their time. Most skip intros and go to tables of content or subheads at once. With that in mind, make your introductory paragraphs short and up-to-point:

If you want to communicate something essential at the very beginning, such as the target audience of your asset or a toolkit they will need to put your tips into practice, then think about how to format it for better content engagement.

Color highlights, lists, and other attention-grabbing elements will work.

Don’t Use Passive Voice

No matter what types of marketing content you create, passive voice is a no-no. It makes your writings unconvincing, though they should be persuasive and encourage readers to act.

It’s specifically true about informative content such as how-to guides: Active verbs telling people what to do are the best writing practice to consider. “Take it” is much better than “it would help if you took it,” as the latter gives the impression that you aren’t sure if your information works.

Don’t Publish Amateurish Content

The reader will trust your informative content if:

1. Its author is an expert in the niche.
2. Its authors share their experience: They tried the service, implemented the tips they’re describing, etc.
3. Its author worked with experts to create this content piece: asked them for insights, and shared their comments.

If you write about something you don’t know inside out, inaccuracies are inevitable. Professionals will notice them by all means when reading your content, and you’ll lose credibility and trust.

Final Thoughts

Marketing campaigns won’t succeed without informational content: They need it to introduce brands to their target audiences, build trust and loyalty, and help consumers step to the next stage of a sales funnel — turning into customers.

When done well, informative content serves both the brand and the customer. The former gets credibility and engagement, and the latter — valuable knowledge to use in practice.

We hope you leave this page with some food for thought. Feel free to use it as a guide to content writing for your business or personal blog, and don’t hesitate to share it with your followers if you like it.